Séminaire EMMA – L'(inter)agir
Seminar: Heteronymous Narratoriality: The Translator (as Narrator) as Somebody Else
Tuesday October 8th – EMMA – Research Seminar – Douglas Robinson
Site Saint Charles – Room 126 – 18h
The interesting begged question in discussions of the translator as narrator is whose narrative is it? The obvious assumption, of course, once we’ve questioned the conventional assumption that it is the source author’s, is that it’s the translator’s: the translator renarrativizes the source text mentally by way of beginning to imagine it as the target text, and then renarrates it in translating it for the target reader. But who is “the translator”? Is s/he, are they, one person or many? This paper will explore translatorial narratoriality in terms of heteronyms, Fernando Pessoa’s term for fully characterized “pseudonyms,” first for traditional translation: (a) the source author as the translator’s heteronym, (b) the translator as the source author’s heteronym, (c) the translating self as the translator’s narratorial heteronym, and (d) the target reader and (e) the source reader as the translator’s lectorial heteronyms. But second, in experimental translations, there are (f … n) any number of other heteronyms, such as the editor, the critic, and the publisher as the translator’s heteronyms.
Douglas Robinson is Professor of Translation Studies and Head of the Division of Intercultural Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, author of nearly three dozen books on translation, rhetoric, semiotics, and Finnish literature, and an active literary translator from Finnish. His experimental translations include three complete translations of Walter Benjamin’s “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“Th’ Upgiving o’ th’ O’ersetter,” “D’ Oof-gobble Dusk Over Seltzers,” and “Benjamins Totin’ Vodka” and a transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle as Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia. His books on experimental translation are The Experimental Translator (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), Translator, Touretter: Avant-Garde Translation and the Touretter Sublime (Brill, forthcoming 2024), and What Experimental Translators Can Learn From Finnegans Wake: Translouting that Gaswind into Turfish(Routledge, forthcoming 2024).
Contact: Lily Robert-Foley
Lily.robert-foley@univ-montp3.fr
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
mdrugeon (3 octobre 2024). Séminaire EMMA – L'(inter)agir. Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone. Consulté le 7 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/12f6f
